Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to an electronic apparatus, and more particularly to an apparatus and a method for generating electronic program guide (EPG).
Description of the Related Art
Along with the advance in technology, nowadays TV is used in almost every family. The hardware of TV evolves from CRT TV, which is large and heavy, to liquid crystal TV, which is slim and light, and the signal transmission of TV evolves from analog to digital. People used to look up TV program list on newspapers. Nowadays, people can easily check the electronic program guide (EPG) provided by the software of the multimedia center of a set top box (STB).
The EPG is implemented by embedding service information (SI) defined according to the digital video broadcasting (DVB) standards into a transport stream (TS) conforming to the MPEG-2 (13818-1) specification. The decoder of the set top box (STB) can retrieve information such as the play list and time table of the programs broadcasted by program providers from the transport stream, and further display the play list and time table through a user interface, such that the user can conveniently select and watch a TV program. The EPG information mainly comprises basic EPG information and extended EPG information. The basic EPG information refer to the EPG information which can be completely described by using network information table (NIT), bouquet association table (BAT), service description table (SDT) and event information table (EIT) of the specifications of conditional access system for digital television (GY/Z174-2001). In addition to the basic EPG information, the extended EPG information refer to the EPG information which are transmitted through data carousel transmission. These information are described by using EPG mapping table (EMT). The contents of information are packaged into a file system with multi-level directory structure, and are referred as the extended EPG content information. During the broadcasting of digital TV programs, auxiliary messages of service information can be added for the developer of set top box to implement navigation function for the EPG. Through the use of the EPG, the user can watch TV programs and look up interesting information. For instance, the user can search programs according to program categories (such as music, sports, movies, and so on) or program providers, and can also check the broadcasting list of upcoming programs and program broadcasting in a video network.
However, as the TV channels are gaining booming development, the EPG information are getting versatile and complicated. When using the set top box, it is a considerable waste of time to browse the program list of each channel to find an interesting program every day. Therefore, how to help the user to quickly find an interesting program from the EPG has become a prominent problem to be resolved.